I failed after rereading 7 times.
I discovered Anki. I built Elaia.

ACT 1: The pain

"The day I failed, I felt deeply disappointed."

I had read the syllabus 7 times. Highlighted it in three colors. Drawn outlines by hand. Spent early mornings with cold coffee rereading, rereading, rereading.

And in the exam, nothing. The questions were on the very topics I had reviewed, but my mind was blank. The feeling was devastating.

Not because I hadn't studied, but because I realized something worse: I had studied the WRONG way.

All that time invested... wasted.

If it has happened to you, you know exactly what I mean. And if it hasn't yet, believe me: rereading is not studying. Even if it looks like it. Even if it makes you feel in control.

ACT 2: The discovery

Ebbinghaus, active recall and spaced repetition

Two weeks later, while trying to work out what had gone wrong, I discovered something.

It wasn't in a self-help book. It was in serious scientific research: Hermann Ebbinghaus, 1885. Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology.

Ebbinghaus measured in 1885 that, without review, about two-thirds of what was learned is lost within 24 hours (he tested it on himself, with nonsense syllables). The shape of that drop, known as the forgetting curve, has been observed again in modern replications.

That's where I found the concept that changed everything: Active Recall.

Reading is passive. Your brain doesn't struggle, doesn't recall. It just consumes. But retrieving information from memory, answering questions without looking, taking tests... that does force the brain to work. To really remember.

And if you also combine it with spaced repetition (spreading reviews over time instead of massing them)... average recall rises from 37% to 47%, according to the meta-analysis by Cepeda et al. (2006), published in Psychological Bulletin, which analyzed 839 assessments across 317 experiments.

I found Anki. And it worked.

I started making cards. Questions on every article of the law. Every concept in the syllabus. Every definition.

Anki asked me the ones I got wrong more often. The ones I knew, less and less.

I went from failing to passing.

But there was a huge problem.

ACT 3: The obstacle

Anki's manual work

"Making the cards took me longer than studying."

For every page of the syllabus, I spent about 12 minutes writing questions by hand.

If the syllabus has 800 pages... do the math. 160 hours just creating material. Before even starting to study.

And that's not all:

• I had to decide what to ask about each article
• Write the correct answers
• Create distractors (realistic wrong answers)
• Format everything in Anki

It was exhausting. But effective.

So I did it. Because I knew it worked.

Until I thought: What if an AI did this for me?

ACT 4: The creation

Elaia was born

The name is no accident. Elaia means "olive tree" in ancient Greek, the sacred tree of Athena, goddess of wisdom. The olive tree stood for knowledge, perseverance and victory in ancient Greece. Just as the olive tree grows slowly but bears fruit for centuries, real learning takes method, not shortcuts.

I looked. There was nothing like it.

There were flashcard apps. "Organization" apps. Apps that promised to help you "study better"...

And yes, AI-generated test apps started to appear. But there was a fundamental problem: their questions were too easy.

Anyone who has sat one of Spain's competitive public exams knows the official questions are convoluted, full of nuance and linguistic traps. They ask "which of the following is NOT correct" or use double negatives. The distractors (wrong answers) are designed to confuse you unless you know the topic 100%.

Generic AI tests ask things like "What is X?" or "How many articles does Y have?". Direct questions anyone would get right after a quick read. That doesn't prepare you for the real exam.

Elaia is different: it learns the style of YOUR exams. You give it questions from past sittings of your exam, and the AI analyzes how the questions are worded, what kind of traps they use and how the distractors are written. Then it generates new questions that imitate that same style. They aren't generic questions: they look like they came straight from your real exam.

But no app was designed specifically to:

1. Read YOUR syllabus (the plain PDF from your course)
2. Generate multiple-choice questions automatically
3. Adapt to you: ask more of what you get wrong, less of what you know
4. Use spaced repetition like Anki, but without the manual work

That's how Elaia was born.

An AI that does in 10-20 minutes what used to take me 160 hours.

But that's not all.

Elaia learns from you as you study:

• Do you keep missing articles 138-156 of the Civil Procedure Act? It asks you more of those.
• Have you mastered Title I of the Constitution? It asks you less and focuses on what you need.
• Has it been 3 days since you saw a topic? It brings it back just before you forget it.

It's like having your own Anki, but:

• Without making cards by hand
• It generates realistic questions from YOUR specific syllabus
• With algorithms that adapt to your pace
• It knows exactly what to ask you and when

Why I built it

Because it was built by someone who:

• Failed by studying the wrong way
• Passed using active recall + spaced repetition
• Spent 160 hours creating material in Anki
• And knows what preparing for a public exam is really like

It's not an app made by people who have never sat these exams.
It's a tool built by an exam candidate, for exam candidates.

"Because I don't want anyone else to:
- Fail because of rereading
- Spend 160 hours making cards by hand
- Get discouraged by studying the wrong way"

If you've spent months rereading without retaining...
If you know Anki but can't face the manual work...
If you've failed and don't understand why...

This tool is for you.